Quotes About Complexity

DNA wasn't a simple recipe book that could be readily understood.

People tend to think that scientists are experts in all things, when in fact we can be so specialized we know less than a layperson about many scientific topics—like bear behavior.

It doesn't change what happened. It simply reveals the truth that we're all weird. We're all messy in our own way.

That the human body or any other animal is a system comprised of millions of smaller systems, some of them completely separate from us genetically, shouldn't be an earthshaking revelation.

A scientist is someone trying to see order in chaos. Sometimes it simply can't be done, as science tells us via quantum mechanics and chaos theory. A thing can

What's the problem? In a nutshell?" "I'm a medical specialist. We don't really do nutshells[.]

The human heart is an abyss that is impossible to predict; the most piercing looks cannot gauge it.'41

Because the art and science of forecasting is so complex, you might be tempted to give all forecasting responsibility to a single manager who can be made accountable for it. But this usually does not work very well. What works better is to ask both the manufacturing and the sales departments to prepare a forecast, so that people are responsible for performing against their own predictions.

as a manager in such a workplace, you need to develop a higher tolerance for disorder.

Grove's Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form.

An imaginary composite index can be applied to measure an environment's complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity, which we'll call the CUA factor.

Here I would like to propose Grove's Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form.

Well, you're either lovers or you're wanting to be lovers or you're trying not to be lovers so you can be friends, but any way you look at it, sex is always looming in the picture like a shadow, like an undertow.

Hardware had to be researched, purchased, secured, integrated, tracked, and disposed of. Software had to be licensed, configured, patched, updated, and eventually replaced. Networks had to be built, secured, upgraded, and inevitably rebuilt. And every component interacted with every other component in curious and unexpected ways, with unexpected occasionally culminating in catastrophic. The

I was thinking. What if the world was like one of those Russian nesting dolls? What if we only saw one surface of it, the outside, but there was all kinds of other stuff going on, too? All the time. Underneath. But we just don't see it, even if we're part of it? Even if we're in it? And what if you had a chance to see a different layer, like flipping a channel or something? Would you want to look? Even if what you saw looked like hell? Or worse?

Complexity is seen as a virtue, a selling-point.

As Albert Einstein said: "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.

As string theorist Brian Greene says in The Elegant Universe: "Another possibility, should strings fail to be the final theory, is that they are one more layer in the cosmic onion.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.

We can see that the Kolmogorov complexity describes the compressibility of the pattern:

To divide all the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as many as were required to solve them in the best way, and to conduct my thoughts in a given order, beginning with the simplest and most easily understood objects, and gradually ascending, as it were step by step, to the knowledge of the most complex.

Fractals are the geometry of chaos, and they are found throughout Nature.

The bottom line is that the human body is complex and subtle, and oversimplifying - as common sense sometimes impels us to do - can be hazardous to your health.

In politics there is nothing simpler than simply talking, and nothing more complicated than simply acting.